Magazines and trays made of thin plastics material are now used predominantly to ship and handle electrical connectors and components. More recently, such magazines and trays have been adapted to be used with robotics equipment; e.g., in mounting electrical connectors onto printed circuit boards.
Known magazines, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 3,184,056 to Kisor, and trays; e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 4,671,407 to Brutosky, have a single layer of one row: U.S. Pat. No. 4,515,269 to Hashimoto, or several parallel rows: U.S. Pat. No. 3,435,949 to Suverkropp. Such a construction; i.e., a single layer, has heretofore been the only structure available for electrical connectors having leads extending outwardly from one surface thereof. For these type connectors, shoulders are required to support the connectors so that the leads can extend into a space to prevent damage thereto and to permit the connectors to slide freely into and out of the row or rows. Multiple layers of connectors are provided by stacking discrete magazines and trays on top of each other. In an effort to improve upon this system and also to economize, one worker in the field, Brutosky, provided trays having downwardly extending skirts which provided an end cover for the underlying tray to confine the connectors during shipping and handling. The aforementioned U.S. Pat. No. 4,671,407 discloses this feature.
It is now proposed to provide a high density magazine having two layers with each layer having at least one row of connectors so that for a given width of a known magazine, the high density magazine will receive twice the number of electrical connectors.